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Everything about Function word
Words supplying mainly grammatical information, rather than content information
In linguistics, function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: Function wordA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: Early executive function predicts children’s Chinese word reading from preschool through Grade 3Influential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: The Meaning of Focus ParticlesThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: Word recognition as a function of retinal locus.Cited 345 times
- Go sideways: Part of speechA closely related topic
- Go sideways: English grammarA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
Noun A word that has little meaning when standing alone, but instead serves to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker, including conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, certain frequent adverbs.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
Word recognition as a function of retinal locus.
Magnocellular visual function and children's single word reading
Learning as a Function of Word-Frequency
Acoustic vowel reduction as a function of sentence accent, word stress, and word class
Authorship Attribution Through Function Word Adjacency Networks
Visual-recognition thresholds as a function of word length and word frequency.
Font and Function Word Identification in Document Recognition
Listening Comprehension as a Function of Word Rate
🆕 Influential since 2022
Early executive function predicts children’s Chinese word reading from preschool through Grade 3
Wrong or right? Brain potentials reveal hemispheric asymmetries to semantic relations during word-by-word sentence reading as a function of (fictional) knowledge
The predictive function of Swedish word accents
The function/content word distinction and eye movements in reading.
Effects of word length and frequency on word identification in second- and fifth-grade children as a function of language skills
📚 Books worth reading
The Meaning of Focus ParticlesEkkehard König · 1991
A la recherche de l'attributGaulmyn/Remi-Gi · 1991- 📕al- Lisānīyāt al-waẓīfīyahAhmed Moutaouakil · 1989
The function of function words and functional categoriesMarcel den Dikken, Christina Tortora · 2005
The function of function words and functional categories · 2004- 📕al-Waẓīfah wa-al-binyahAhmed Moutaouakil · 1993
- 📕Jin dai Han yu xu ci yan jiu =Zhaohua Zhong · 2011
- 📕Wu yu xu ci ji qi yu fa hua yan jiu郑为 · 2017
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
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